This blog is about thinking of things past, present and future in testing. As much as I'd like to see clearly, my crystal ball is quite dim. Learning is essential and this is my tool for that.
A sister blog in Finnish: http://testauskirja.blogspot.com

Thursday, August 30, 2018

The Rewrite Culture and Programming Ecosystems

With 25 years in testing and close collaboration with many software teams working with different languages, there is a particular aspect to software development that is close to my polyglot programmer heart. I love observing programming ecosystems.

The programming ecosystem is a construct around a language that shows in many ways. We see some of the aspects in jokes of how different programming languages approach things. I see it for now as a combination of at least the following:

programming language

preferred IDE

3rd party tooling and use of libraries

community values

culture of what you can do (without getting in too much trouble)

Moving between ecosystems makes you pay attention to how things have shifted and moved. The bumble bees moving between ecosystems look to be advancing things within the ecosystems, trying to bring better parts from one to another.

I'm thinking of this today, because someone proclaimed yet another rewrite. They will scrap all there was because figuring it out is too difficult and it is ugly code (tm) and write it again beautiful. I just think the definition of beautiful here is "I understand it", not "We all understand it". And my tester spidey sense is tingling, because every single rewrite I've ever seen results in losing half of the features that were not evident from the code, but held in the tester memory bank of purposes why the software exists and flows for users it is supposed to be created for.

I realized rewrite culture is part of the C++ ecosystem a little more than some of the other language ecosystems. When in Crafter community we have the discussions of generally favoring refactoring over rewriting (gradually cleaning up), suggesting that in the C++ ecosystem feels like I'm suggesting something unspoken. Knowing how much the tooling differs for example for the C# ecosystem, this all makes more sense. Refactoring C++ is a different pain. And it makes sense to move the pain in this ecosystem more towards those who end up testing it with a lot of contextual information.

And please, don't tell me that "not all C++ developers". Enough of them to consider it a common view. And not just in this particular organization.

We become what we hang out with unless we actively exert energy into learning new patterns that contradict what comes easy.

I love programming. And in particular, I love the programming ecosystems and how it talks to me about the problems I end up finding (through paying attention) as tester.